21st November 2003 Archive

Peeved that AMD is taking the 64bit plaudits this week, Intel has promised that Itanium's twelfth year will be its finest yet. The project began in December 1991, and was formally unveiled in a joint announcement with Hewlett Packard in 1995. Some analysts were cautious: in 1997 IDC predicted that it would be 2002 before EPIC would be the dominant desktop chip.

NTL is to zap 2,000 jobs over the next couple of years. The cableco isn't planning a sweeping redundancy programme and it doesn't know yet which jobs are to go, according to the FT which got the scoop.

Broadcom was the star of the WLAN chip market in the early part of this year, stealing a march on all its rivals with its successful gamble on leaping into the 802.11g market even before the standard was finalized. This helped it to gain a significant lead over Intel, which is still to implement ‘g’ in Centrino, and to position itself to take a top two position – coming from almost nowhere in 2002 – in the sector.

Mixed fortunes for enterprise WLANs, if the latest crop of research results are anything to go by. A survey by investment bank Goldman Sachs found that wireless Lans are now rated ‘low priority’ for IT spending, according to a panel of 100 CIOs. In the same survey last year, WLANs rated in the top category. The bank says this is mainly because most companies have already adopted Wi-Fi and see further investments, for instance in upgrades, as luxuries.

High performance systems? You seen any high performance systems, Rico?

Is it just us, or could Gartner's latest advice for Linux-packing corporations have similar application in slightly different contexts? Is it, do you think, perhaps the kind of language Edward G Robinson might understand?

AMD's first 90nm processors will go into volume production during Q3 2004, the company said yesterday, narrowing the focus of its recently released public roadmap from any time in the second half of the year.

Two announcements this week affect the Oracle vs Peoplesoft hostile merger, a Peoplesoft endorsement of the decision by the European Commission to carry out a deeper review, and some adjustments to the terms of Peoplesoft’s new refund program.

Six British men were sentenced today to a combined total of 15 and a half years imprisonment for involvement in a major ID theft and fraud conspiracy. The fraud, which netted the gangs £350,000 over two years, is reckoned to be the biggest case of its kind to date in the UK .

Last week we reported on preliminary research from security firm A.L. Digital which suggested a number of security problems with Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones from Nokia and Ericsson. The paper argued that digital pickpockets could swipe address books and data from mobile phones because of security shortcomings in the implementation of Bluetooth by the manufacturers.